1 Introduction
This chapter discusses some of the key approaches to understanding the dynamics of environmental change. It focuses on both human and non-human factors to contextualise the possible impact of global climate change on Africa. The global climate change argument emphasises environmental agency even as human atmospheric pollution is identified as the underlying cause. Global climate change is depicted as an unintended consequence of human activities, which set in motion processes of change with outcomes that are neither desired nor controlled by humanity. Global climate change is expressed in terms of nature’s revenge and is in many ways reminiscent of the morality of the biblical flood narrative.1 Thus, by and large, the global climate change debate highlights the effects of the powers of nature over human culture within an environmentally deterministic framework. This approach fits within a larger pattern of a post-modernisation theory paradigm of environmental change that no longer unambiguously sees humanity as having domesticated, conquered, or killed nature. An unbridled belief that Western science and technology would bring economic growth and prosperity through mastering the forces of nature and harnessing them for the good of humanity characterised the 1950s–1970s. Even the declinist paradigm, while lamenting the environmental cost of progress and questioning the morality of the domestication and death of nature, worked from the premise that humans were increasingly in control. Most approaches to environmental change in that period identified human actions as the critical engine of this process. The political ecology approach focused on power struggles over the environment or affecting the environment. In Africa, such studies highlighted how environmentalist agendas served as a legitimisation for or tool of imperial or colonial expansion, pitting the (colonial) state or settlers and their collaborators against local African communities. Thus African hunting, gathering, pastoralism, and crop cultivation were criminalised or severely constrained by the imposition of conservation schemes, such as the establishment of game reserves, national parks, and forests or the introduction of veterinary measures and anti-erosion projects.2 The impact of (Western) markets and commodification was another form of human agency that dramatically shaped the environment through overhunting and poaching. Commodification also changed the face of agriculture in Africa, for example through the introduction of large-scale commercial agriculture (plantations and settler agriculture) and subsequent land alienation.3 Commodification and the imposition of colonial power also led to the colonial state’s channelling of African rural labour from pastoralism and crop cultivation into the colonial economy through forced labour, forced cultivation, and migrant labour.4 Often intertwined with the above approaches was a scientific/technological determinism model that highlighted the impact of modern ‘Western’ knowledge on Africans and Africa.5 Modern Western medical knowledge and practices were identified as key factors in reducing mortality, for example through vaccinations and clinics. Rapid population growth after the Second World War was seen as the result of an unchanged ‘culture’ that emphasised large numbers of children to compensate for high infant mortality. During the 1970s and 1980s, the ‘population bomb’ was identified as the largest threat to Africa’s future and development.6
During the 1970s and 1980s, the era of the modernisation-cum-developmentalist paradigm, studies that emphasised environmental forces over human agency were relatively rare and mostly considered the impact of desertification and climate change in the Sahel region in the 1970s.7 Early studies about the history of famines in Africa also interpreted famines as outcomes of the vagaries of climate and environment. In the 1980s, however, humans or humanity (including the impact of colonial political and conservation measures) and issues of entitlement (or rather the lack thereof) were increasingly identified as the deeper causes of famines.8 Influenced by the declinist paradigm, which emphasised human-caused environmental destruction, the agency of culture over nature was probably exaggerated. Upon closer inspection, even the population bomb argument was ambiguous in terms of agency. Modern culture (through medicine and public health) was said to reduce mortality, privileging human agency, while continued high fertility rates were attributed to ‘traditional African culture’. But, at the same time, African traditional culture was defined in terms of Africans living in or very close to and by nature: their proclivity towards large families was ascribed to the (natural) urge of (primitive) people to procreate without bounds. Alternatively, per a moral economy argument, it was claimed that Africans invested in family and community as insurance against old age, sickness, and famine.9 In that sense, the population bomb argument is in many ways reminiscent of the nature’s revenge component of the current debate on global climate change. Similarly, another approach to environmental change, which highlights biological invaders, also acknowledges nature’s agency. This latter model is best known for its relevance to (North) America, where invasive species, in particular smallpox, but also horses, sheep, and a myriad of plants, caused dramatic environmental upheaval.10 The literature has since expanded by not only emphasising European species in this ecological imperialism, but also African biological invaders (such as yellow fever).11 In the context of Africa, invaders from outside the continent have received less attention (exceptions are the prickly pear and maize); instead, the emphasis has been on ‘indigenous’ species that have run amok because of disturbances to the continent’s ecological equilibrium. The violence of colonialism, including conquest and population displacements, caused a number of endemic diseases, like sleeping sickness and malaria, to turn into epidemics.12 These approaches effectively also fit into the nature’s revenge pattern, since the disturbance of the ecological equilibrium is depicted as if awakening the dark forces of nature. In this context, the model of global climate change as a backlash from nature triggered by a long history of human abuse is thus not new. The nature’s revenge language provides a powerful call for us to change our ways. However, despite the fact that humanity bears great responsibility in the squandering of environmental resources, the nature’s revenge language glosses over the intricate dynamics that mark environmental and climate change. Nature and culture need to be considered in unison because they are inextricably intertwined. The nature’s revenge interpretation is derived from and embedded in the 20th-century nature-culture dichotomy and is conceptually inadequate to understand and diagnose the new challenges of the 21st century.
Global climate change is expected to further marginalise African livelihoods and rural economies, causing some parts of the continent to become drier and other parts wetter.13 The most pernicious impact, however, may be that Africa’s environment will become even more capricious. The African environment has often been portrayed as hostile to human existence (consider, for example, its historical reputation as the ‘white man’s grave’).14 It also harbours such dangerous diseases as malaria, bilharzia, aids, and Ebola. Africa’s population is concentrated in semi-arid regions where rainfall is scarce and unreliable: droughts are frequent, and torrential rains cause floods. A key factor in identifying Africa as the most vulnerable continent is the very perception that African societies are directly dependent upon their fickle environment. Africans are often presented as living virtually in and by nature. Societies elsewhere, by contrast, are considered to be shielded from nature’s whims (and therefore, by extension, from climate change) by a cultural environment created from and through modern technology and science.15
Yet, the inverse argument has also been made: that modern Western societies are more vulnerable to the vagaries of the environment (and therefore climate change) because commercial industrialised production systems are geared towards maximising production, are highly specialised, and rely on a narrow range of resources and technologies. Industrial agriculture, for example, is dependent on the monocropping of a few key cultivars with little or no genetic diversity, dramatically increasing crops’ exposure to drought and disease. In contrast, African ‘traditional’ agriculture is less vulnerable because it is much more diversified and geared towards risk evasion rather than maximising production.16 In fact, the main criticism of African ‘traditional’ household agricultural production is that risk-evasive strategies obstruct development. According to this argument, African farmers are hesitant to substitute low-productivity land races with high-yielding genetically improved cultivars and invest in social networks rather than in economic production.
The differences in the respective relationships of Western and African societies to nature, however, have been vastly overdrawn. The misconception is embedded in a paired dichotomy that subsumes the non-West under nature and the West under culture, thereby contrasting nature with culture and the non-West (and the pre-modern) with the modern West. As demonstrated by the dangerous dependency of modern industrial (and post-industrial) society on a single non-renewable, increasingly scarce, and highly polluting source of energy (hydrocarbons) as well as on monoculture food sources, and a vulnerability to ‘wild’ fires (from the Oakland Hills to the Cape Flats) and ‘wild’ waters (such as the New Orleans and Rhine floods), modern Western technological infrastructure is far from impervious to nature and global climate change. African societies have equally relied on an infrastructure, such as elaborate systems of water harvesting, food storage, and black soil creation, and land management structures and institutions to regulate use of and access to environmental resources. African environmental infrastructure also includes burning regimes and vegetation management (to control insects like the mosquito and the tsetse fly and to maintain pastures) and transhumance (to rotate pastures and ration water). Thus, although rural Africa is dramatically deficient in terms of such ‘modern’ technological infrastructure as all-weather roads and bridges, the presence of environmental infrastructure cushions the impact of weather and environmental extremes. Environmental infrastructure has to be constantly maintained, repaired, and re-invented in the face of new challenges: it is and has to be highly dynamic.17 Furthermore, environmental infrastructure may fail, either as a result of repeated drought or as a result of war and population displacement. In turn, weak environmental infrastructure may worsen the impact of droughts and floods. This chapter focuses on late 1920s and early 1930s north-central Namibia, when a global climate event (a drought that affected Southern Africa as severely as it did the North American Dust Bowl), a global economic crisis, and regional political and demographic events nearly led to a killer famine. The history of the drought demonstrates how the environment and climate are embedded in and fractured through social, economic, and political factors.
Climate and drought were key factors in north-central Namibia’s ‘Famine of the Dams’ in the 1920s and 1930s. The drought was so severe and prolonged that the environmental infrastructure that served to store water and food was strained to breaking point. The collapse of the water and food storage infrastructure, however, was not only due to climatic or environmental factors, and neither the causes nor the impact of the famine were linear or homogenous. Refugees from war and famine with limited or no access to their own or others’ environmental infrastructure proved most vulnerable, as is reflected in how the famine was depicted and explained: the famine, for example, is remembered as both the ‘Famine of the Dams’ and, paradoxically, ‘the enriching famine’. Memories of the famine thus demonstrate that it was seen as both a natural and a social phenomenon.
2 The Famine of the Dams
In 1915, South African colonial forces invaded what was then German South West Africa and marched beyond the German colony’s northern border to occupy what became known as Ovamboland. Two colonial officials administered Ovamboland through a system of indirect rule: the local chiefs and headmen were held responsible for order, justice, taxation, and labour recruitment. In an area that is semi-arid, millet was the staple crop and most households also kept livestock. Most men engaged in migrant labour on farms and mines in Namibia or South Africa. The area is highly semi-arid. The Ondjala yOmatale, the Famine of the Dams, affected much of colonial Namibia’s Ovamboland, especially the two largest and most populous regions, Ondonga and Oukwanyama. Yet, in its early stages, the impact of the famine was very limited and localised. Independent environmental variables over which local communities had no influence, such as rainfall patterns, played an important role in the emergency, but the extent to which local ecosystems had been transformed by human activity was also critical. While another section of Oukwanyama that belonged to the Portuguese colony of Angola was filled with villages and was referred to by its inhabitants as oshilongo (the settled zone), Namibian Oukwanyama south of the border was mostly referred to as ofuka (wilderness). Most of the ofuka area had been settled in the decades before the famine by refugees and migrants from Angola. The colonial boundary between the two Oukwanyamas therefore largely coincided with an (environmental) infrastructural fault line that emerged during the early stages of the famine: Oukwanyama south of the border became a recipient of food aid, while Oukwanyama north of the border supplied most of the food aid.
During the early stages of the famine, mobility as well as social networks enabled the worst affected households to seek resources from other households, villages, and areas that controlled surpluses, either locally or further afield. Less fortunate households approached more privileged relatives or local headmen for the millet staple, or, alternatively, for livestock with which to purchase grain. Livestock owners exchanged their animals for food. Cattle herds from the drought-affected areas were led north into Angola to Oshimolo, where water and grazing remained available. A considerable number of people who recently had moved to Namibian Ovamboland chose to return to the Angolan side, where the food situation was much better. The latter strategy, however, led to the direct intervention of the colonial state, and transformed the drought from an agricultural and ecological crisis into a political and economic emergency.
3 The Ecology of a Famine
all over the country one sees emaciated cattle, unable to move lying down. The owners […] build shelters to protect the beasts from the heat. It all depends on the owner whether he is prepared to carry food and water, anything from five to seven miles, to these animals.20
By early 1929, over 5,000 head of cattle had perished in Namibian Oukwanyama alone, perhaps up to one-quarter of the total herd.21 The severity of the drought prompted Namibian residents to seek out water sources and pastures in Angola. The villages on the Angolan side of the border were older villages with an established human-created water infrastructure. Considerable numbers of men, women, and children, sometimes led by prominent headmen, moved across the colonial border to the Portuguese-controlled side towards the end of the 1920s.22 Migration to Angola continued throughout the first half of 1930.23 Except for a strip of land directly north of the border, rainfall and harvests in Angolan Oukwanyama, in the heart of the old Oukwanyama oshilongo, had been much better.24 Throughout the 1929–1931 famine years, Angolan Oukwanyama supplied both individual households and the colonial authorities in Namibian Ovamboland with large quantities of millet.25
During the January 1929 rainy season, patchy rains caused the situation in Namibian Oukwanyama to deteriorate further. By the end of January, many households had not yet planted any grain. Although some households survived on tree fruit, the fruit harvest was a total failure in the western half of Ovamboland. An invasion of grubs—so-called armyworms—resurrected terrifying images of the devastating 1915–1916 famine known as the Famine of the Insects, which had killed hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people.26 Fortunately, February rains heralded the return of migratory birds that curtailed the spread of the insect plague.27 The environmental and social variables that contributed to the famine are closely intertwined. The old Oshikango district was the only district south of the modern border that had formed part of the settled core of the pre-colonial Oukwanyama kingdom in its entirety. Its landscape differed sharply from the other districts south of the border, as described in colonial archives and oral histories. The new farms and villages across most of the adjacent Omhedi and Onenghali districts and throughout the Ohaingu, Onahulu, Onamine, Onamunama, and Okalongo districts had been recently carved out of the ofuka, the wilderness. Although this area was abundant in game and wood, settlement in the ofuka was risky because it lacked the necessary environmental infrastructure (waterholes, fruit trees, raised fields, fenced farms, and food stores) to sustain its inhabitants in the face of drought, floods, and marauding wild animals and birds. Thousands of refugees who had fled violent Portuguese colonial exactions to settle on the South African-controlled side of the border during the 1910s and 1920s had only just begun to transform the ofuka into oshilongo by the late 1920s.28 This unfolding yet incomplete process of creating environmental infrastructure explains to a significant extent why the drought conditions in most of Oukwanyama on the Portuguese side did not lead to a similar emergency and why even south of the border the impact of the famine was uneven.
Two of the four Namibian Oukwanyama districts in which senior headmen approached the colonial administration with requests for food aid were located entirely outside of what until 1915 had been the southernmost settled part of pre-colonial Oukwanyama: Ohaingu and Onanime. The remaining two, Onenghali and Omhedi, each contained only a very small slice of the old pre-colonial Oukwanyama oshilongo.29 These districts lacked the infrastructure (especially waterholes and water reservoirs) that marked the old Oukwanyama across the border in Angola.
Moreover, Namibian Oukwanyama was flooded by refugees from the Ondonga area, which was even more seriously affected by the drought. With the failure of the 1929 harvest, many Ondongas abandoned their farms for neighbouring communities. At Ombalantu, to the southwest of Oukwanyama in Ovamboland, they were turned away. “Large numbers” of Ondonga refugees migrated to Omulunga, east of Oshiede in Angolan Oukwanyama, where land and water were abundant. Others went as far as Ombadja and Humbe, deeper into southern Angola. Hundreds of Ondonga stayed closer to home and ‘squatted’ in Oukwanyama villages south of the border. The influx of so many refugees was an additional burden on already scarce food and water supplies in Namibian Oukwanyama.30
Detailed insights into the impact of the famine in Namibian Oukwanyama are offered by data taken from reports about the drought conditions in July 1929. The data was gathered from 135 Oukwanyama village headmen and probably included all the villages in Oukwanyama south of the border. The village locations were indicated according to their position east or west of the old Ondangwa–Oshikango road (a rather arbitrary distinction), which ran approximately one to two miles to the west of the modern tarred road.31 Of the 135 villages, 132 reported a poor harvest, the remaining three a fair harvest. All but one headman reported having a famine-affected village. Cattle had been sent to remote cattle posts: 94 village headmen stated that the cattle from their villages were in Angola. Grazing conditions were different east and west of the road for the livestock remaining in the villages (mainly goats). In Oukwanyama, east of the Oshikango–Ondangwa road, 31 of the 42 villages (74 per cent) reported grazing in or near the village as “nil” and nine (21 per cent) as “good”. West of the road, where the majority of villages were located, grazing was slightly better: only five of the 93 villages (five per cent) reported grazing conditions as “nil”, 84 (90 per cent) as “poor”, and only four (four per cent) as “fair” or “good”.32
Extreme water scarcity also illustrates the severity of the drought. West of the Ondangwa–Oshikango road, 18 per cent of the villages relied on water located at least 1.6 kilometres away, while ten per cent of the villages relied on water sources at a distance of three to eight kilometres away. In Oukwanyama, east of the road, 16 per cent of the villages relied on water at least 1.6 kilometres away, while 33 per cent relied on water sources situated three to eight kilometres away.33 All water sources were man-made; during the dry season villagers had no access to any natural sources of water in the region.
Finally, the survey demonstrated that the drought led to substantial population displacement. 42 per cent of all Oukwanyama villages hosted Ondonga-based households, and thirty per cent reported Ondonga refugee households squatting in their villages. In addition, 24 per cent of all Oukwanyama’s villages reported losing households that had fled to Angola.34
In 1929 Ovamboland’s colonial administration initiated a single food for work project in Oukwanyama in the village of Etale. Local enthusiasm for contributing labour towards the construction of a dam in exchange for food aid, however, proved limited. Alternative sources of food—such as patronage networks—prevailed, while October rains relieved water shortages and allowed for field preparation and seeding. Locals participated in the food for work program only in December when drought conditions persisted and the plantings were lost. The Etale dam, a water storage reservoir meant to alleviate watershortages during the dry season, was completed in mid-December.35
After losing their first batches of millet seed during the normal planting period (October–December) because of the continued drought conditions, people were loath to commit their dwindling seed reserves to parched fields, although the longer they waited, the less time remained in the cropping season. Most of the cattle herds remained at remote cattle posts north of the border in Oshimolo because of the shortage of water and grazing in the Namibian villages. Optimistic herdsmen who had driven herds in their care back to Namibia after the first promising rains had returned to Angola by December. Several of the most recently established Angolan refugee villages in Oukwanyama were virtually abandoned because they lacked reliable sources of water. In the far eastern Namibian Oukwanyama village of Eenhana, drinking water had to be fetched in drums from Angola (requiring a trip of ten kilometres to the border alone) or Oshikango (forty kilometres). In the most recently settled areas in far western Namibian Oukwanyama—Okalongo, the situation was equally serious: only a single well dug by a missionary remained as a source of drinking water for all the villages in the area. By the end of 1929, therefore, large areas of Namibian Oukwanyama were scarcely better off than Ondonga. In December 1929, the headmen of the villages of Onekwaya and Ohalushu reported the first cases of starvation in Oukwanyama.36 The onset of the Marula season in January 1930, when tree fruit became available, reversed this trend. Onekwaya, located within the confines of the pre-1915 Oukwanyama oshilongo, was blessed with an established environmental infrastructure, including fruit trees. Many of the newer villages established by Angolan refugees before the famine, however, had few or no fruit trees, since the most common ones, such as the Marula (Sclerocarya birrea) and Birdplum (Berchemia discolor), do not bear fruit until ten to fifteen years after planting.37
In May 1930, colonial Namibia’s Director of Works conducted a sample survey of 172 randomly selected households in Ovamboland. The surveyors concluded that only the three consecutive years of drought could explain why Ovamboland’s “excellent system of grain storage” could no longer keep “an acute general famine” at bay. Despite the owners’ “considerable resentment”, the surveyors opened the clay-sealed grain storage baskets in the sampled households and measured their contents. They found “[m]ore than one kraal […] where the people had no mahangu [millet] left, and had substituted watermelon pits as part of their diet”. Almost half of the sampled households in Ondonga had depleted their millet stores. The same was true for one-quarter of the sampled households in Oukwanyama. Most of the livestock of the surveyed households had been herded to remote cattle posts in Angola, depriving households of access to dairy products and compounding their nutritional stress. The smaller communities in western Ovamboland generally fared better.38
4 Ondjala Yokoyolangudja or “The Enriching Famine”: the Moral Economy of a Famine
During the early phase of the drought, social networks such as clans and patron–client networks mitigated the effects of the food crisis, but social networks for the redistribution of food soon collapsed.39 During the first phase of the Famine of the Dams, social networks in colonial Namibian Oukwanyama were a critical component of the arsenal of drought-coping mechanisms. The colonial official in Oshikango in the heart of Oukwanyama noted the large-scale destruction of palm bushes that took place during the peak of the 1929 famine. The palm bushes were tapped to make palm wine, which not only provided nutrition but was also exchanged for grain with the “principal headmen” and important “small headmen”, since “they will not give away any grain except for some sort of payment”.40
In essence, the ‘exchange’ of palm wine for grain may be compared to the giving of Marula wine (made from the fruit of the Marula tree) to village headmen, district headmen, and kings, which is strongly symbolic as recognition of a tributary or patron–client relationship.41 It thus suggests that people sought to widen or strengthen existing social networks around patrons in order to gain access to additional sources of food, a moral economy transaction.42 Offering a small share of one’s own home-made Marula wine or palm wine to a social superior established a patron–client relationship, ‘obligating’ the patron to support the client in times of need. Patrons often took their obligations seriously. For example, Elisabeth Ndemutela could barely recall the Famine of the Dams because during emergencies her household had been supplied with food by her grandmother or her ‘uncle’, the powerful senior headman Nuyoma Moshipandeka. Mwulifundja Linekela Haiyaka had just become a widow during the Famine of the Dams and, together with her mother and grandmother, survived on food aid supplied by senior headman Jikuma.43 In recently settled villages, however, social networks proved too frail. During the 1920s, Twemuna Shifedi’s family had moved from the village of Edundja to settle in Ondaanya, in the depths of what was still considered ofuka. The isolated villagers could not call on wider social networks during the famine because other settlements were simply too far away. All but two households subsequently abandoned the village.44
the natives who own a small supply of corn or dried melon pits are afraid to sleep at nights and spend their time patrolling their kraals. The principal headmen will on no account assist their subjects and remind me of a lot of ghouls in the way they guard their grain baskets.46
People with access to money or cattle, either directly or through patronage networks, suffered less as a result of the famine. Handsome profits could be made by selling grain at high prices and/or extending client networks through food gifts. Some headmen who assisted colonial officials with the distribution of food aid were remembered to have abused their positions.47
5 The Poverty of Patronage: the Political Economy of a Famine
Although the threat of a serious famine in Ovamboland loomed large by early 1929, Namibia’s highest colonial official was reluctant to intervene; the cost of an emergency food aid programme in Ovamboland was estimated at 5,000 pounds sterling. The administrator for colonial Namibia relented only after being assured that taxation would be subsequently introduced in Ovamboland. These taxes served to establish ‘Tribal Trusts Funds’ to finance any future emergency relief, all local development projects, and the introduction of salaries for Ovamboland chiefs and principal headmen designed to make them more accountable to the colonial authorities.48
Against the spectre of starvation, the introduction of a five shilling tax on all adult men in Ovamboland met with little opposition from the headmen and chiefs, yet the project collapsed on the ground. In Ondonga, tax registration and collection started in October, although little was accomplished. In Oukwanyama, registration seemed promising at first, but collapsed due to a tax revolt among Oukwanyama migrant labourers in Luderitz in southern Namibia and the fear of massive tax flight to Angola.49 To the chagrin of the South African colonial officials, who generally looked down upon their Portuguese counterparts across the border, the Portuguese administration in Angola managed to collect its taxes as usual during 1930, highlighting the uneven impact of the drought across the colonial border. The South African official in Oshikango snidely noted that “much comment is made amongst the natives on the attitude of the two governments in respect of tax during the famine period”.50
The fear of drought-induced massive migrations from colonial Namibian Oukwanyama to southern Angola—which would prejudice South Africa’s labour supply—figured prominently in the decision to cancel tax collection and extend food aid to Oukwanyama. Although local officials downplayed the refugee dislocation caused by the drought, the above-mentioned July/August 1929 survey revealed that one out of every four villages in Namibian Oukwanyama had lost one or more households to Angola.51
For financial reasons, the Ovamboland authorities ceased to accept cattle in lieu of cash for the food aid it supplied at subsidised prices. Households without cash were thus forced to take their cattle across the border to Angolan Oukwanyama to purchase grain.52 Meanwhile, the Portuguese authorities used this dependence on Angolan food supplies to coerce Oukwanyama refugee households in colonial Namibia into returning to Angola. The colonial Namibian administration responded by increasing its food aid programmes in the form of food for work projects and free rations.53 The colonial government began food distribution in Ondonga at the end of January 1929 in order to bridge the period until the May harvest.54 Throughout the colonial era, the South African and Portuguese authorities competed to attract migrants from the well-populated border region. During the 1910s and 1920s, violent Portuguese rule had caused migration and flight from southern Angola into Ovamboland. The Famine of the Dams, however, threatened to reverse this population flow, causing much anxiety among South African officials in Namibia because Ovamboland was the territory’s main source of migrant labour.
The Namibian administration first introduced food for work programmes in hard-hit Ondonga in July 1929 to construct so-called dams, water reservoirs to sustain large numbers of people and livestock during the dry season.55 The dams consisted of relatively shallow excavations in seasonal watercourses or in pans in which water accumulated during the rainy season. The excavated earth was used to raise the banks of the dams to increase their storage capacity. The excavations could not be too deep, since salty water lay beneath the layer of impregnable subsoil.56 The name of the 1929–1931 “Famine of the Dams” derived from the fact that most food for work projects consisted of the manual construction of large dams/water reservoirs.
In Namibian Oukwanyama, relief work began only in October, after the Portuguese administration had clamped down on the transborder grain-for-cattle trade and grain shortages increased. The Portuguese authorities halted the grain trade to force Oukwanyama households that had fled to the Namibian side of the border in previous years to return to Angola.57 Construction of the Etale dam in Oukwanyama, as for that of the two dams in Ondonga, relied on manual labour. Officials supplied picks and shovels and a few spades and wheelbarrows at each dam site.58 The bulk of the labour was performed by women, girls, boys, and older men, with individuals from each of these categories receiving different amounts of food aid. Children received 0.5 lb; girls 1 lb; women and boys 1.5 lb; and men, “police boys”, and headmen 2.25 lb.59 Recruiting workers for the Etale dam proved to be difficult. The Oshikango-based official, H.L.P. Eedes, despaired that “apparently” people were unwilling to work for food alone.60 Most adult men had left their villages to trade for food, herd, or seek work in central and southern Namibia.61
The food for work programme in Namibian Oukwanyama ended with the onset of the rainy season in December 1929, although food aid in neighbouring Ondonga continued.62 By January 1930, however, an increasing number of people who had exhausted their patronage and family sources appeared on the doorstep of the local colonial government representative in Namibian Oukwanyama, Eedes. Eedes urgently requested food supplies from his superior, Hahn, but the latter refused to accept his subaltern’s assessment of the situation leading to a bitter conflict between the two men. Food for work programmes and free food aid were only resumed months later after Eedes had been relieved of his duties and replaced at Hahn’s urging.63
Eedes’ successor was either sufficiently intimidated by the fate of his predecessor or too inexperienced to be able to assess the full extent of the famine. His first report—for July 1930—stated that there were “no real cases of hardship up to the present. There are undoubtably [sic] a number of families who have very little food, for whom some relief must be afforded in the coming months. I am of [the] opinion that the majority are not so bad off as might be expected.”64 A month later, after travelling through Oukwanyama to meet headmen anxious about the food situation and being confronted with mounting evidence that households were fleeing to Angola in increasing numbers, he sounded much less confident. In July, he reported that “numbers of the poorer people are at the end of their resources and will expect food assistance very soon”. At the same time, to avoid disagreement with his superior, he added: “[it is] difficult […] to gauge the food supply, natives naturally make the position much worse than it really is […] Mr. Hahn informs me that he has the question of corn and mealie [maize] meal well in hand and as any sudden emergency can be met there is no cause for anxiety.”65 Evidence of his growing anxiety, however, is strongly suggested by his obvious relief at the “timely” arrival of emergency food supplies, which in his words “released the tension and re-established confidence in the Administration”.66
As had been the case during the previous year, most government food aid was distributed through food for work programmes aimed at improving the water infrastructure. Free distribution was kept to a minimum; able-bodied women and children constructed the dams in exchange for food rations. To prevent competition with the migrant labour supply, only adult men who were not targeted for migrant labour recruitment—heads of households, old men, and those put in charge of homesteads and livestock—were employed at the dams.67 Whereas during the previous year labour recruitment for the single dam project in Oukwanyama had been challenging, during September 1930 many more men were engaged in the projects than the administration deemed advisable. The projects primarily aimed to employ women.68 Migrant labour opportunities for men, however, declined steeply due to the impact of the global economic depression.69 Since food was distributed in a limited number of locations, people often walked for long distances on a regular, if not daily, basis. Although her relatives provided her with some food, Pauline worked at Onenghali dam, nine kilometres from her village. Salome Tushimbeni Haihambo, a girl from a single-parent household that had recently migrated from Angola to Omataku, twenty kilometres east of Onenghali, also worked at Onenghali Dam.70
Native Commissioner Hahn remained extremely reluctant to acknowledge the extent of the famine in Oukwanyama district, but the threat of large-scale population flight from Ovamboland to the Portuguese colony forced him to introduce famine aid in the district. However, he limited any food aid to a minimum in a district that was largely populated by recent refugees and migrants from southern Angola. Before the famine, Hahn had actively encouraged migration from Angola to Namibian Oukwanyama to enlarge the colony’s black labour supply. The Famine of the Dams coalesced local and state patronage networks and blended the spheres of moral economy and political economy. When local patronage networks collapsed, the colonial state stepped in, becoming the supreme patron: the state supplied much of the emergency food during the height of the Famine of the Dams. Government food assistance brought the colonial state into much closer contact with the population of Ovamboland, especially women, suggesting that the reach of the colonial state had expanded.71 In this sense, food aid serves as an indicator of the strength and penetration of the colonial state. Paradoxically, however, because the colonial administration in Ovamboland did not have the staff to supervise food distribution, emergency supplies were redistributed through local ‘big men’, which consequently strengthened and widened the range of select local patron–client relationships.
Distributing food aid through local ‘big men’ solidified a layer of ‘traditional leaders’ known as ‘principal headmen’. Hahn relied significantly on Ovamboland’s kings (renamed chiefs) and headmen for his system of indirect rule. By relying on the headmen for much of the day-to-day administration, South Africa could rule the large population of Ovamboland through a handful of white officials headed by Hahn and, later, by his successor Eedes. The two-layered structure of principal or senior headmen and junior headmen or sub-headmen is comparable to the structure of village headmen and district or provincial headmen in the pre-1915 Oukwanyama kingdom. The difference between the pre-colonial and colonial structures was that, rather than being the king’s district headmen, the South African colonial officials in Ovamboland selected their own favourites. ‘Indirect rule’, which in the case of Ovamboland also functioned as a discourse to camouflage the inherent weakness of the colonial overlords, facilitated the consolidation of these revamped patron–client relationships, allowing them to be institutionalised in wider territorially based units and offices rather than in individuals. However, the senior headmen often also exploited their key positions in the system of indirect rule to expand their personal positions of power vis-à-vis the majority of other headmen.72
Ironically, food aid in northern Namibia exported the famine to southern Angola. A large percentage of the food distributed through the government centres was purchased in Angola. In addition, many households located near the Angolan border bought grain directly from producers in Angolan Oukwanyama or from Portuguese traders. Although the Portuguese administration kept the border formally closed for the trade in grain and cattle to all but Portuguese traders throughout most of the famine, by September 1930 a large number of traders from Namibian Oukwanyama, especially from the “wealthier class”, were buying food from producers and traders across the border. In fact, supplying the high demand for grain in northern Namibia seriously depleted food stores in southern Angola, and by September 1930 food shortages just across the border from Namibia were as acute as in Ovamboland. Deeper into southern Angola, in Mupa (Evale) and Mulondo “fair” quantities of food were still available. In October, sales by Portuguese traders dropped because the Portuguese administration restricted the purchase of grain from producers in districts where supplies were running low.73
The Portuguese administration in southern Angola, however, lacked both the means and the will to enforce its policies. By December 1930, Portuguese traders were again conducting a “fairly big trade”, although they only accepted payment in the form of breeding stock. The increase in the price of grain—in September 1929 a heifer bought two bags of millet (40 lb), whereas in December 1930 it bought only 1.25 bags (25 lb)—should therefore be seen as a reflection of both an increased demand in Oukwanyama south of the border and a decreased supply in Oukwanyama north of the border and in southern Angola in general.74 Taxation and grain sales to buyers from Ovamboland and Portuguese traders depleted reserves in southern Angola, rendering households north of the border less resistant to drought. Already in August 1930, food shortages immediately to the north of the border were “every bit as bad” as they were to the south. Despite famine conditions in Ombadja (west of Angolan Oukwanyama) since June, the Portuguese administration only introduced very limited emergency aid in September. Moreover, the Portuguese authorities never relaxed their forced labour policies. In March 1931, Portuguese officials arrested eight Ombadja principal headmen “for failing to provide free labour for road making. The headmen and their followers were forced to work for two weeks, when they were released.”75 The famine conditions spreading into southern Angola while the Portuguese officials refused to relax their heavy taxation and forced labour recruitment, extinguished South African fears for a mass exodus from their territory into the Portuguese colony.
6 The Return of the Rains
Good rains in December 1930 and January 1931 radically improved food availability throughout Ovamboland, especially of highly nutritional vegetables and tree fruit. In Namibian Oukwanyama, rains allowed millet to be sown “in the sandy areas”, the softer soils that required a less abundant soaking before they could be tilled, in as early as October 1930. However, seed shortages prompted the Oshikango-based officer to supply small quantities of seed to the “poorest”, but a dry spell from mid-January to mid-February, with only very “patchy and irregular” rainfall, damaged the emerging crops. In Ondonga, food for work programmes continued until early March. The remaining famine supplies were sold or issued to the “very old and indigent natives who will have no means of subsistence until they reap their own crops”. By the end of March, abundant rains had not only filled waterholes and pans, but also the newly constructed dams in Ondonga and Oukwanyama. In early April, the semi-annual flood or Efundja, fed by rains further upstream in Angola, submerged the lower-lying areas in the Ovambo floodplain on either side of the colonial boundary.76
Conditions improved more drastically in Namibian Oukwanyama than elsewhere in Ovamboland: by January all fields had been planted. Cabbages, melons, and tree fruit became available in January and were plentiful in February. Abundant rains, however, also increased weed growth. With many people physically weakened because of the famine, weed control was difficult. The colonial official instructed the headmen “to keep a watchful eye on fieldowners who may neglect to keep the fields free from weeds”. In February, remaining free food rations were halved.77 The 1931 harvest in Namibian Oukwanyama was above average; the headmen estimated that the millet supplies would last for two years.78 For the first time in several years, the cattle herds were brought back from the remote cattle posts to the villages and paraded at the customary cattle fests. In September, conditions had improved to the extent that clan elders and headmen allowed women’s initiation (Efundula) ceremonies to take place, paving the way for bridewealth exchange and marriage, demonstrating that the crisis was over and normal life could be resumed.79
7 Conclusion
The Famine of the Dams was not merely about entitlement, nor was it solely the result of an episode of climatic drought episode. ‘Nature’s revenge’ narratives are equally as one-dimensional as explanations that privilege social factors or emphasise the political ecology. The late 1920s drought in Southern Africa was in many ways caused by a global climatic phenomenon. However, the extent to which drought conditions morphed into a famine was the product of a constellation of environmental, political, and social factors. Climate fluctuations intersected with recent massive population displacements in a politically unstable border region. Refugee households proved highly vulnerable to the vagaries of the climate. In Namibian Oukwanyama, recent migrants and refugees from north of the border had not yet managed to construct the fully developed environmental infrastructure of villages, farms, fields, water sources, food stores, and fruit trees that had marked the southern Angolan homes that they had abandoned during the first two decades of the 20th century. Moreover, the drought turned into a famine not only due to environmental factors, but also as a consequence of the colonial Namibian political economy. The timing and protocol of emergency government intervention in Oukwanyama clearly show how political considerations dominated the food aid agenda. The colonial administration was reluctant to declare a famine emergency given the expected cost of food aid in the context of a global economic recession. Only concern that the early 1900s refugee flow from southern Angola to north-central Namibia might be reversed convinced the colonial authorities of the need to introduce food aid, which was purchased from food stores in southern Angolan villages. This food aid, as well as water and grazing in southern Angola, proved crucial in staving off famine in Namibian Oukwanyama. Yet, ultimately this strategy drained food and water supplies in southern Angola, leaving the spectre of famine to loom large across the border until the drought finally broke in 1931.
A new look at African famines may offer avenues for reassessing how climate and society interacted in the past, which is suggestive of how environment and society in Africa may fare under the impact of global climate change in the present and future. The example of the Famine of the Dams suggests that the impact of global climate change cannot be understood in terms of a linear cause-and-effect relationship, with climate (nature) causing direct environmental change that in turn shapes human societies. The current debate about climate change is constrained by operating very much within a nature–culture paradigm that identifies forces of nature and forces of culture (human agency) as discrete analytical and narrative categories. The inhabitants of north-central Namibia in the 1920s and 1930s, however, did not live in and by nature, nor had they harnessed nature and replaced it with culture. Instead, they created environmental infrastructure to interpret, divert, or reshape climatic effects, in the process diluting or exacerbating their impact through religion, migration, and social, economic, cultural, political, and environmental reinvention and reimagining.
On the biblical flood and global climate change, see, for example, Keulemans, M., “Klimaatdebat is in Zekere Zin een Voortzetting van Bijbels Eindtijdverhaal,” Volkskrantkatern Vonk, March 24, 2014.
On game conservation, see, for example, Anderson, D., and R. Grove, ed., Conservation in Africa: People, Policies and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); MacKenzie, J.M., The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Carruthers, J., The Kruger Park: A Social and Political History (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995); Neumann, R.P., Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On land use and conservation, see, for example, Beinart, W., and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890–1930 (London: James Currey, 1987); Anderson, D., “Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography, and Drought: The Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa during the 1930s,” in Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa, vol. 2: The Colonial Epoch in Africa, ed., G. Maddox (New York: Garland, 1993), 209–231; McCann, J.C., Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800–1990 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1999); Jacobs, N.J., Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Tropp, J.A., Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Showers, K.B., Imperial Gullies: Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).
For example, Palmer, R., and N. Parsons, ed., The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Bundy, C., Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London: Heinemann, 1979); Beinart, W., P. Delius, and S. Trapido, ed., Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa, 1850–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986); Anderson, D., Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya 1890–1963 (Oxford: James Currey, 2002).
On forced cultivation, see Isaacman, A., and R. Roberts, ed., Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995).
On technology, see Goody, J., Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). On firearms, see Headrick, D.R., The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 83–126. For a critique of linear models of technological determinism, see Kreike, E., Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia: The Global Consequences of Local Contradictions (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 113–138. More recently, knowledge production has been depicted as a two-way process. See Grove, R.H., Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Harries, P., Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2007); and Tilly, H., Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Ehrlich, P., The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968). For a critique, see Boserup, E., The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (New York: Aldine Pub. Co., 1965); Tiffen, M., M. Mortimore, and F. Gichuki, More People, Less Erosion: Environmental Recovery in Kenya (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1994).
On climate change and African history, see Brooks, G.E., Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in West Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); Webb, J.L.A., Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); McCann, J.C., “Climate and Causation in African History,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 32.2–3 (1999): 261–280.
On famines in Africa, see Watts, M., Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Vaughan, M., The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); de Waal, A., Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
On the moral economy concept, see Scott, J., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). The moral economy is upheld as a pre-modern era precursor to the modern rational economy in the developmentalist/evolutionary view of history.
Crosby, A.W., The Columbian Exchange: The Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood, 1972).
Kiple, K.F., The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Curtin, P.D., Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Fenn, E.A., Smallpox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1782 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
Law, R., The Horse in West African History: The Role of the Horse in the Societies of Pre-Colonial West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); McCann, J.C., Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); van Sittert, L., “‘The Seed Blows About in Every Breeze’: Noxious Weed Eradication in the Cape Colony, 1860–1909,” Journal of Southern African Studies 26.4 (2000): 655−674; Kreike, Deforestation, 83–112. On invading microbes in Africa, e.g. rinderpest, see van Onselen, C., “Reactions to Rinderpest in Southern Africa, 1896–1897,” Journal of Southern African Studies 13.3 (1972): 473–488; and Peires, J.P., The Dead will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989). On malaria and environmental management, see Kjekhus, H., Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: The Case of Tanganyika, 1850–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1977); Giblin, J., The Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania, 1840–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Lyons, M., The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Hartwig, G.W., and K.D. Patterson, ed., Disease in African History: An Introductory Survey and Case Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978); Maddox, G., J. Giblin, and I.N. Kimambo, ed., Custodians of the Land: Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania (London: James Currey, 1996); Giles-Vernick, T., and J.L. Webb, ed., Global Health in Africa: Historical Perspectives on Disease Control (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013).
A 2012 study noted that extreme rainfall and flood events in Africa corresponded to El Niño occurrences (e.g. 1982–1983 and 2006–2007), see Kundzewicz, Zbigniew W. et al., “Flood Risk and Climate Change: Hydrological Perspectives,” Hydrological Sciences Journal 59.1 (2012): 1–28.
For Africans as a source of contagion, see Farley, J., Bilharzia: A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13–20, 137–139. Iliffe frames African history as a long struggle to overcome a hostile environment, see Iliffe, J., Africa: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Kreike, Deforestation.
This is a major argument of the indigenous knowledge literature, see, for example, Bassett, T.J., and D. Crummey, ed., African Savannas: Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Environmental Change (Oxford: James Currey, 2003); Leach, M., and R. Mearns, Beyond the Fuelwood Crisis: People, Land and Trees in Africa (London: Earthscan, 1988); Fairhead, J., and M. Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
On the environmental infrastructure concept, see Kreike, E., Environmental Infrastructure in African History: Examining the Myth of Natural Resource Management in Namibia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
National Archives of Namibia (henceforth nan), Native Affairs Ovamboland (henceforth nao) 18, Monthly Reports for Ovamboland, July−September 1928; and NAO 40, “Note of interview with his honour the administrator [of SWA] 9/2/29 in regard to prospective famine conditions in Ovamboland.”
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports for Ovamboland, July–August 1928.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Report for Ovamboland, January 1929.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Report Oukwanyama, January 1929; NAO 40, Officer Commanding (henceforth O/C) Oshikango to O/C NAO, Oshikango, March 11, 1929, “Stock Losses: Ukuanyama;” and “Particulars Obtained from Headmen in Western Ukuanyama Area re. Famine etc.;” “Particulars in Regard to Famine Ukuanyama Areas received from headmen east of the main road from Ondonga to Oshikango,” and Appendices to O/C Oshikango from O/C NAO, Oshikango July 31 and August 8, 1929.
Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal (henceforth ahu) 9, 590, 20, Fronteira Sul de Angola, Processo No. 265-C, C.R. Machado, Chefe da Delegação Portuguesa, Oluchanja, 23 Julho 1927, annex: considerações de carácter reservado, to Chefe da Delegação do Governo da União; nan, NAO 17, O/C NAO, October 16, 1927, to Mr. Clarke; NAO 18, Monthly Report Oukwanyama, October 1927; ibid, Monthly Report for Ovamboland, September 1928. See also the following interviews by the author: Ester Nande, Onengali, May 20, 1993; Moses Kakoto, Okongo, February 16, 1993; and Petrus Mbubi, Onanime, February 26, 1993.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, June–August 1930.
Kalolina Naholo, interview by author, Ohamwaala, January 26, 1993.
nan, NAO 41, Native Commissioner Ovamboland (henceforth nco), Famine Reports, September−October and December 1930; Union (of South Africa) Government Representative Namacunde (henceforth ung), Union Administration 2 folder 1922−1946, ugr Oshikango, Monthly Report, December 1929; nan, NAO 40–41, Reports on Famine Relief Works: Oukwanyama, August 1930–February 1931; and Trust Fund Ovamboland, Statement for February 1930.
On the previous famines, see Kreike, E., Re-Creating Eden: Land Use, Environment, and Society in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004).
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, January−February 1929. On the failure of the fruit harvest, see NAO 40, O/C NAO to Secretary South West Africa (henceforth swa), Ondangwa, January 15, 1929, and Assistant Priest St. Mary’s Mission to O/C NAO, [Odibo], January 10, 1929.
Kreike, Re-Creating Eden.
nan, NAO 40, O/C NAO to Secretary swa, Ondangwa, March 18, 1929; O/C Oshikango Station to O/C NAO, Oshikango, March 11, 1929 (both letters of that date); O/C Oshikango Station to O/C NAO, Oshikango, April 18, 1929; O/C Oshikango Station to O/C NAO, Oshikango, May 8 and 15, 1929; and O/C NAO to O/C Oshikango Station, Ondangwa, May 12, 1929.
NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, May−July 1929.
The old road was known as Shongola’s road (shongola was the nickname for Native Commissioner C.H.L. Hahn). The old road cut the Oshikango district in two, but Onenghali, Onanime, and Onamunama districts were located east of the road and Omhedi, Ohaingu, Onahulu, and Okalongo to its west.
nan, NAO 40, “Particulars Obtained from Headmen in Western Ukuanyama Area re. Famine etc.;” and “Particulars in Regard to Famine Ukuanyama Areas Received from Headmen East of the Main Road from Ondonga to Oshikango;” and appendices from O/C Oshikango to O/C NAO, Oshikango July 31 and August 8, 1929.
nan, NAO 40, “Particulars […] Western Ukuanyama Area re. Famine;” “Particulars […] East of the Main Road from Ondonga to Oshikango;” and appendices to O/C Oshikango Station to O/C NAO, Oshikango, July 31 and August 8, 1929.
Ibid.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, September–October 1929; and NAO 41, Famine Relief Ukuanyama, Works Issue Schedules, October–December 1929.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, September–December 1929.
On the history of the fruit trees, see Kreike, Environmental Infrastructure, 36–62.
nan, NAO 40, Director of Works to Secretary swa, Windhoek, June 3, 1930.
Hayes. P., “The ‘Famine of the Dams’: Gender, Labour and Politics in Colonial Ovamboland, 1929–1930,” in Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility and Containment, 1915–1945, P. Hayes et al., ed. (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 117–146.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Report Oukwanyama, December 1929.
Loeb, E.M., In Feudal Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1962), 177.
Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant.
Interviews by author: Elisabeth Ndemutela, Okongo, February 16–17, 1993; and Mwulifundja Linekela Haiyaka, Omhedi, February 8, 1993.
Interview by author: Twemuna Shifidi, Ondaanya, January 28, 1993.
See nan, NAO 41, Famine Relief Report Oukwanyama, February 1931, Special Issues; and Famine Relief Reports Oukwanyama, January–February 1931; and Famine Report Ovamboland, January 1931.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Report Oukwanyama, December 1929.
Interview by author: Helena Nailonga, Ekoka laKula, February 23, 1993; and Nahango Hailonga, Onamahoka, February 4, 1993.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, January–February 1929. See also NAO 40, O/C NAO to Sec. swa, Ondangwa, January 15, 1929; Assistant Priest St. Mary’s Mission to O/C NAO, [Odibo], January 10, 1929; and “Note of interview with the administrator 9/2/29 in regard to prospective famine conditions in Ovamboland.”
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Report Oukwanyama, January 1930; Accession 450, 7, Administrator swa to Prime Minister Pretoria, Windhoek, September 6, 1932; NAO 40, “Note of interview with his honour the administrator 9/2/29 in regard to prospective famine conditions in Ovamboland.” See also NAO 42, Courtney-Clarke to Secretary swa, Windhoek, May 6, 1929; Ibid, document with heading “Tribal Trust Funds” with nine points regarding taxation [1929]; O/C NAO to Secretary swa, Ondangwa, October 13, 1929.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Report Oukwanyama, October 1930.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, June–August 1930; NAO 40, “Particulars […] Western Ukuanyama”; “Particulars […] East of the Main Road”; and appendices from O/C Oshikango to O/C NAO, Oshikango, July 31, and August 8, 1929.
nan, NAO 40, O/C NAO to Secretary swa, Ondangwa, May 25 and 30, 1929; Acting Secretary swa to O/C NAO, Windhoek, May 18, 1929; O/C NAO to Secretary swa, Ondangwa, May 25, and June 6, 1929; and V. Alho (Finnish Mission Society) to O/C NAO, Olukonda, April 17, 1929.
nan, NAO 9, O/C NAO, September 6, 1929, to Secretary swa and NAO 18, Monthly Report Oukwanyama, September 1929.
nan, NAO 41, Statement of First Consignment of 948 bags of maize meal received at Ondangua from 28/1/29 to 24/4/29 for Famine Relief Ovamboland. In addition to the food bought from the colonial administration, Ondonga households purchased millet in Oukwanyama and western Ovamboland from 1928 to 1930, NAO 11, Annual Report, Finnish Mission Society, 1930.
nan, NAO 40, Director of Works to O/C NAO, Windhoek, June 17, 1929, and O/C NAO to Secretary swa, Ondangwa, July 17, and August 10, 1929.
nan, NAO 40, Director of Works to O/C NAO, Windhoek, June 17, 1929.
nan, NAO 9, O/C NAO to Secretary swa, September 6, 1929; NAO 18, Monthly Report Oukwanyama, September 1929.
nan, NAO 40, O/C Oshikango to O/C NAO, Oshikango, July 8, 1929.
nan, NAO 41, Famine Relief Ukuanyama, Works & Issue Schedules, October−December 1929.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, September and October 1929; and NAO 41, Famine Relief Ukuanyama, Works & Issue Schedules, October–December 1929.
nan, NAO 40, O/C NAO to Secretary swa, Ondangwa, May 25, June 6, July 17, and August 10, 1929; ibid. O/C Oshikango to O/C NAO, Oshikango, May 8 and 15, August 8, 1929 and O/C NAO to O/C Oshikango, Ondangwa, May 12, 1929; NAO 18, Monthly Report for Ovamboland, January 1929, and Monthly Report Oukwanyama, September 1929; Pauline, interview by author, Onengali, December 15, 1992.
On food aid, see nan, NAO 40, O/C NAO to Secretary swa, Ondangwa, September 5, 1929 and NAO 41, Famine Reports Ovamboland, October–December 1930.
nan, nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, December 1929 and January 1930; NAO 40, O/C NAO to Secretary swa, Ondangwa, March 11, 1930; Weekly Drought Reports, weeks ending March 22 and 29, and May 5, 1930. Sold as famine aid for forty shillings per bag, grain prices were subsidised since one bag cost fifty shillings. The Portuguese traders in southern Angola sold grain at forty shillings per bag, see NAO 40, Secretary swa to O/C NAO, Windhoek September 28, 1929.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, June and July 1930 and September–November 1930.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, June, July, and September–November 1930.
nan, NAO 18, Monthly Report Oukwanyama, August 1930.
nan, NAO 40, Office of the Administrator swa to O/C NAO, Windhoek [August or September] 1930, and NAO 41, Famine Relief Report Oukwanyama, Works & Issue Schedules, September–November 1930.
nan, NAO 41, Report on Famine Relief Works: Oukwanyama, September 1930.
nan, NAO 41, Famine Relief Report Oukwanyama, December 1930.
Pauline, interview by author, Onengali, December 15, 1992, and Salome Tushimbeni Haihambo, interview by author, Oipya, June 19, 1993.
Hayes, “A History of the Ovambo,” 330–331.
Kreike, Deforestation.
nan, NAO 41, nco, Famine Reports, September-October and December 1930; ung, Union Administration 2 folder 1922–1946, ugr Oshikango, Monthly Report, December 1929.
nan, NAO 41, nco, Famine Reports, September-October and December 1930; ung, Union Administration 2 folder 1922–1946, ugr Oshikango, Monthly Report, December 1929.
nan, NAO 18–19, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, June–September 1930 and March 1931.
nan, NAO 41, Famine Relief Reports Oukwanyama, January-March 1931; and NAO 18–19, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, October and December 1930, and January–February 1931.
nan, NAO 41, Famine Relief Report Oukwanyama, January-February 1931; Famine Relief Reports Ovamboland, January 1931; and NAO 18–19, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, December 1930, January and February 1931.
nan, NAO 19, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, June/July 1931.
nan, NAO 19, Monthly Reports Oukwanyama, March and September 1931.